Brugge Blog

Part of me knows that I always have to use critical filters when reading news stories to look for exaggerations, falsehoods or conjectures. I sometimes forget to be on the lookout for omissions, partly because, by their nature, they’re hard to spot - how do you know something is missing if you don’t know much about the topic?

However, when I do know something about a topic, the omissions can be startling, frustrating, or just plain sad. Take the stories about the recent presedential elections in Guatemala. For the little coverage in the local (or national) news that this country gets, I’m usually excited to find someone taking an interest in the goings on there. Unfortunately, I’m usually disappointed in the coverage, not because they have their facts wrong, but because of the small set of common facts that seem to get reported in every story about Guatemala that appears: it’s a small country, 30 year civil war, poverty, violence.

When I read the newswire stories of the runup to the election last week, it seemed that the stories focused on (a) the common, repeated facts, and (b) the possibility of a former dictator getting elected. Never mind the fact that the former dictator was running a distant third the entire time, he was the one making the headlines, not the leading candidates, and seldom were their issues - there just wasn’t much space left in a 20-inch story once you’ve included all of the foundational elements needed for any story on Guatemela.

The heartache I feel is that there is so much about to tell about the country and its people that is beautiful instead of violent. What would happen if a reporter used this quote from Martin Prechtel’s Secrets of the Talking Jaguar as their lead in instead of the standard copy:

Delicious, melancholy, lovely, full of flowers, mystery, laughter, and an extraordinary amount of suffering; if Guatemala were a woman, not a man alive wouldn’t be lovesick for her. At once the wealthiest and the poorest nation in Central America, she is culturally the richest.

Of course, this argument could be made for any country whose condition only comes under the lens of the media when something bad happens.